While the five-second rule can still hold true in terms of contact time, other factors must also be considered in terms of food safety. As ideas go, its appeal is straightforward and damn-near universal: After all, it’s a ready-made excuse not to have to get rid of perfectly good food just because it happened to hit the floor for a few seconds there. Still, if you need hard-hitting evidence, researchers have now provided a comprehensive study that proves the rule is down for the count.
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Their findings will appear in the American Society for Microbiology’s journal. In many instances it can begin within a second.
Some researchers have set out to disprove that theory when it comes to food contamination.with interesting results.
But this week researchers at Rutgers University determined that this rule is really more of a myth.
The study isn’t the first to quash the popular rule.
“The initial transfer of bacteria is insufficient to contaminate the food”, says his report. The nature of the food and the surface it comes into contact with are the chief components that affect the outcomes of this study. Even though it’s harmless, Enterobacter aerogenes mimics the attachment skills of Salmonella, a common food pathogen. Finally, they tested different durations each food item spent on the ground, including less than a single second, as well as five seconds, 30 seconds, and 300 seconds. All totaled 128 scenarios were replicated 20 times each, yielding 2,560 measurements. Wood’s transfer rate is variable – it’s all dependent on the topography of both surface and food. The four surfaces were stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet. Post-transfer surface and food samples were analysed for contamination.
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And if you thought your recently mopped kitchen floor would be the safest place to eat your dropped food from, think again. In reality, bacteria infect the food within the instant of contact. However, with bread, bread and butter, and gummy sweets, the transfer was negligible in less than 5 seconds, even 30 seconds in some cases. Schaffner thinks that’s because the liquid used to contaminate the carpet soaked through to the base, and the food came into contact with the carpet’s top layer.
